The 10/20/30 Rule and How to Use it

by Nadine

After a more or less relaxing weekend – by now we know who cuts a fine figure on a bike, and who doesn’t 😄 – our three teams are back to work. Altogether, they are pretty busy evaluating their ideas, discussing them from different perspectives and then transferring them to new business models.

A crucial aspect when it comes to finally having their ideas and business models assessed by our jury is their presentation: on pitch day, our teams will only have a few minutes to convince the ‘investors’ of the jury to finance their ideas.

So what should our candidates keep in mind regarding their presentations? Well, first of all, far too often startup founders waste valuable time – including time with investors – talking about and showing the wrong stuff. If you don’t grab their attention right away, you’ve lost!

What’s really helpful here is the so-called 10/20/30 rule from Silicon Valley veteran, and famous Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. It’s quite simple: a pitch should have 10
slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points.

Sounds really easy, but once you try it, you’ll see that it’s quite a challenge to focus only on a few key messages and leave out all the details … And then again, isn’t ten slides too few or a thirty-point font just too large?

Well, surely, it depends on the occasion and reasons for your presentation – it’s a huge difference whether you want to convey crucial contents to your colleagues or convince an investor to buy your idea. However, in the end, it’s not about sticking dogmatically to ten slides only or a thirty-point fond, but to remember the principles behind 10/20/30, and that is: reduce complexity and focus on what’s really relevant!

Or, as Albert Einstein said: „Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”